Bush to order 21,500 more troops to Iraq
Source: Reuters
(Updates with Reid, Pelosi comments, other details) By Steve Holland WASHINGTON, Jan 10 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush will tell skeptical Americans on Wednesday he will send about 21,500 extra U.S. troops to Iraq and admit it was a mistake not to have more forces fighting the unpopular war in the past. Defying Democrats and unswayed by polls showing the public opposes a fresh infusion of American troops in the nearly 4-year-old war, Bush planned to lay out his new war plan in a 9 p.m. EST (0200 GMT) White House address. In a nod to war-weary Americans, Bush will acknowledge their patience is running thin and pressure the Iraqi government to perform or risk losing U.S. support. The new goal is for Iraqis to take over their own security by November, but U.S. officials said this was not a hard deadline. "The president will say very clearly that it is time for the Iraqis to step forward, that there is no indefinite commitment to (the) U.S. presence in Iraq," said a senior Bush administration official. Senior administration officials said 17,500 troops would go to Baghdad and 4,000 to volatile Anbar province, with the first wave of troops expected to arrive in five days. Others will come in additional waves, joining about 130,000 already in Iraq. Under the plan, the Iraqi government will deploy additional Iraqi troops to Baghdad with a first brigade deploying on Feb. 1 and two more by Feb. 15. They are to sweep Baghdad neighborhoods regardless of sectarian pressures and follow a chain of command leading to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. DEMOCRATS CRITICAL Democratic leaders of the U.S. Congress emerged from an afternoon meeting with Bush to say the president was making a mistake by increasing troops and that they were not consulted well enough in advance to have an impact on his policy. Past troop increases had not worked, they said. "This is the third time we are going down this path, two times it has not worked and we wanted to know why there was any prospect that it would be successful now. Why are they doing this now? That question remains," said California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said their advice had no impact. "He (Bush) was attentive to everything we said, but the speech is written," he said. They plan to hold symbolic votes in the House and the Senate that will force the president's Republicans to take a stand on the proposal and could isolate Bush politically over his handling of the war. In his address, Bush will acknowledge past mistakes, including saying more U.S. and Iraqi troops should have been used in prior military operations in Iraq. "The president will say very clearly tonight that there were mistakes with the earlier operations, that we did not have enough Iraqi troops or U.S. troops, that the terms in which our troops would actually conduct these operations were flawed," White House counselor Dan Bartlett told CBS's Early Show. Bush will say sectarian violence "overwhelmed the political progress that we expected" and will "make clear our current strategy in Iraq is not working," a senior administration official said. By summer, perhaps August, U.S. officials will be able to determine whether they new strategy is working, one official said.The cost of the new troop increase would be around $5.6 billion. An additional $1.2 billion would finance Iraqi rebuilding and jobs programs with the aim of cutting down on the supply of new recruits for militias. Democrats could try to cut funding for the revised war strategy, but so far the party's leaders have shied away from threats to do that. Bush will call for turning over security of all Iraqi provinces by November, but officials cautioned that this did not represent a timetable for a U.S. pullout. Iraqis currently control only three of 18 provinces. PUBLIC OPPOSITION The president faces a tough sell, after nearly four years of war and scenes of carnage that have undercut his argument that victory is possible in Iraq. A USA Today/Gallup poll said Americans oppose the idea of increasing troop levels in Iraq by 61 percent to 36 percent. Many of Bush's own Republicans expressed unease with the idea of a troop increase, with many noting that an effort last year to try to stabilize Baghdad by adding troops was followed by more violence. "I don't know the numbers, but we've done 20,000 before," Sen. Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, told CNN. It will be different this time, Bartlett told CNN. "I think the concerns they're raising is because in the previous attempts the Iraqis hadn't stepped up with the number of troops that they said they would commit," he said. "That is going to be a difference this time." (Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria, Caren Bohan, Kristin Roberts, Susan Cornwell and Jeremy Pelofsky)
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